Relationship Between Children's Social Competence, Learning Motivation and School Achievement

Abstract

The influences of the social environment and affective factors on academic achievement were identified as early as the 1970s. This line of research continued in the following decades, but the relationship between social competence and academic achievement remained a neglected issue. The aim of the empirical research presented in this paper was to define those components of social competence that influence learning motivation and academic achievement. The following components of social competence were selected for analysis: dynamism, dominance, cooperativeness, politeness, scrupulousness, perseverance, emotional control, impulse control, openness, external-internal control attitude and attachments. Four questionnaires were administered to a sample of 6th and 10th grade students (altogether 438 subjects). The results show that the assessed social factors are not affected considerably by age. The correlation analyses reveal the importance of intrinsic motivation within learning motivation, manifested in its strong relationship to the variables representing the social factors of personality except for emotional stability. The results of the regression analysis indicate that friendliness and openness have the largest impact on each other among social factors extraversion. The results show that conscientiousness, openness and academic self-concept explains most of the variance in intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation seems to exert considerable effect on these three variables.